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<title>Impossible Sky by tsukara (AndThenTheresAnne)</title>
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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/23906959">Impossible Sky</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/AndThenTheresAnne/pseuds/tsukara'>tsukara (AndThenTheresAnne)</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>Doctor Who (2005)</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>Background Doctor/Rose, Gen, Teaspoon and an Open Mind repost, The Infinite Quest, Was something no one watched, but have some fic anyway</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>Completed</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2007-12-09</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2007-12-09</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-02 18:42:15</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>General Audiences</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>No Archive Warnings Apply</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>1</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>816</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/23906959</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/AndThenTheresAnne/pseuds/tsukara</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>An exploration of the throwaway line in "The Infinite Quest" that mentions the Doctor had to work for three years, and another dismissing his hearts' desire as impossible to find.</p>
<p>Probably best read anytime after viewing "The Infinite Quest".</p>
            </div></td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>Impossible Sky</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>It was sad really. An old rusting relic of a ship that had once been so great, now relegated to myth and the shadows of desires. He’d had a lot of time to think during those three years that he worked. Reflecting on his hearts’ desires took some of that time. That’s what the search was about after all.</p>
<p>Thinking about his hearts’ desires, his deepest, secret longings, inevitably led to thinking all that that he had lost. Nine hundred years, nearly a thousand now, had not been kind to him. And the two things that he might have asked for from something able to give him anything, were so thoroughly lost that nothing could be done.</p>
<p>Most of the time, he had been able to put thoughts of that nature to the back of his mind, shoving them back into their dark recesses. But in the quiet moments that came in a day to day life–how he hated the very idea of it–he could not prevent them from creeping out, and taking over.</p>
<p>
  <i>What if it…</i>
</p>
<p>He would throw himself into unnecessary work, finding employment for his hands that was never enough to drive the unbidden thoughts away entirely. When there was no work left to be done, he would walk on the frozen surface of the prison planet, feeling the cold seep into his bones, trying to numb himself to the thoughts, the traitorous ideas that would creep in.</p>
<p>
  <i>What if she…</i>
</p>
<p>How can one’s desires come true again if they have once already? How can one’s hopes and dreams of impossible things be rendered by something that is only real? He would have scoured the universe before now if he had had any hope in this Infinite. But his hope was left with a girl on a beach, somewhere in a strange Norway where it could never be retrieved.</p>
<p>When he found Martha, down in the disturbed darkness of the dead ship hold, face to face with a frightening reflection of himself, he sighed a little within. It was nice that Martha wanted him, he supposed. But he felt bad, because he couldn’t do her justice.</p>
<p>Martha was brave and smart and plucky. She was determined, and he knew that he could count on her. She was everything that he could want in a companion and a friend.</p>
<p>But she wasn’t Rose.</p>
<p>He knew that that was terribly unfair to Martha. But that didn’t change things. He hugged her, trying to convey the apology he couldn’t articulate to her words. <i>I’m sorry. I sorry that I can’t love you the way you want. I’m sorry that I gave my hearts away to a girl who you will never know. I’m sorry that you love me.</i> He didn’t think she got the message. She wasn’t a mind reader, after all.</p>
<p>He felt the power there, tingling at his back, felt it reaching out to him in a whisper he can barely hear underneath the crackle of the electricity the power disturbance was setting off.</p>
<p>
  <i>What if, Doctor, what if you could have it back? All of it. A home, and a place to belong. Gallifrey and Rose. What if…</i>
</p>
<p>He could almost see it too: Rose, laughing with her blonde hair in her face again, standing under an orange, domed sky, and the bone-white of the citadel rising behind her.</p>
<p>
  <i>No.</i>
</p>
<p>It was as simple as that. Because he knew, he knew, that it was impossible. All of it. She was gone and his planet had burned out of time and space. Against the impossible, there was nothing that an old, dying skeleton of power could do. Re-creating them would be blasphemous to the originals, and would hurt all the more because they weren’t and never could be, real.</p>
<p>He wouldn’t do that. Even for one last fleeting glimpse of her face, her smile. Even for one last breath of the Maldor trees in the dying warmth of evening. He loved them too much for that. It would hurt too much.</p>
<p>
  <i>Your heart’s desire…</i>
</p>
<p>“Don’t even try to find my hearts’ desire,” he tells the power, tells Martha. Impossible.</p>
<p>Impossible.</p>
<p>He tells himself, and Martha, that it doesn’t matter. He tries to convince himself. “Didn’t work on me.”</p>
<p>He files away the image, blonde hair burnished by an impossible sky, in the corner of his mind where the other shattered hopes lie. He is glad of it when the ship falls apart, disintegrating back into the silence of deep, empty space, broken only by the spurts of lightning from such power and the echo of the sound of a thousand suns burning in their spheres.</p>
<p>He puts away the past, and goes on to the next random set of numbers, with a companion that he cannot love properly, and the ship that is all he has left of his hearts’ desires now.</p>
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